Agent 47?
As a yearly blockbuster, Call of Duty, through sheer expense and effort, would like you to think it is the Die Hard of video games. Or, depending on the setting, the Saving Private Ryan of video games. But it is barely Black Hawk Down. This latest campaign inCall Of Duty: Black Ops 6reminds me more of the forgettable Netflix shootfests that thumbnail their way across your TV screen as you try to find some gritty nothing to aid you in zoning out of life. Still, there is an anecdotal contingent of casual sofa sitters for whom Call Of Duty isthegame. A balls-to-the-wall shooter to return to every winter and rinse through in a weekend. Ed has already gestured at its multiplayer, announcing:“yup, it’s COD”, like a deeply tired Captain Birdseye inspecting the day’s catch, wondering when his life will change. But never mind that. How does the single player story mode hold up? Some are calling it the best campaign in years. And I guess that’s true, in the sense that it is the least worst.
Once you make it through this airport security ordeal of a launcher, the campaign’s story presents itself with the usual tacticool flair. A mission has gone wrong and the CIA has taken away your spy gun and your spy badge. You’re off the case, Case! (Your name is “Case” by the way). As a result of this suspension, you and a gang of other disaffected spooks (some familiar, others new) decamp to a safehouse to plan their next globe-trotting gun jaunt. They want to find and shoot the shady paramilitary group that ruined everything on their ill-fated mission - a group of baddies called the Pantheon.
This is the ongoing difficulty with Call-o-dutes. For anyone deep into the hobby of gaming, it is a kind of scarecrow, cobbled together from the remains of the straw from last year’s instalment, then expensively patched up with whatever parts of other games the developers found cool enough to crib. We’ve seen the Far Cry camera tagging in COD before, but some other inspirations feel newly acquired. The RC car deploying enemies ofThe Divisiongames show up, for example. The nippy remote controlled floor-cars ofRainbow Six Siegealso appear, if lacking the multiplayer mind games that make Ubisoft’s voyeuristic scout cams compelling in the first place. It even goes fullMetro Exodusfor one mission, deploying you in a broad map of the Iraqi desert, full of SAM sites to disable and downed helicopter teams to rescue. If you liked playing Big Boss in Afghanistan, you’ll really tolerate this!Call Of Duty: Black Ops 6has the weird distinction of being the only video game I know that includes fast travel forprecisely one level.
Someone who doesn’t play as many games as we dweebs at RPS may be wowed by these levels in which you go roaming enemy compounds, making strictly limited choices, completing superficial anti-puzzles, and placing C4 only in the preset spots the game allows. But that just makes me want to shake such blissful first-person dabblers and scream at them to go playMetal Gear Solid V, for heaven’s sake. Go playHitman 3. These are games which actually invest in the systems and designs that create interesting moments of play. Call Of Duty has always been on-rails, yes. But it also tries to pretend it is not. And it is frustrating to see so many people praise it for offering a thin illusion of player freedom. As if it were Activision that is reviving theimmersive sim, and not thecountless indiesorshuttered studiosactually responsible.
Even the transparently gamey character upgrades are ineffectual. You can unlock these at work stations in your safehouse, using stacks of cash you find hidden in corners during missions. Perks include being able to aim down sights 25% faster. Or recharge health a little faster. Or fractionally reduce flinching when you’re hit. It’s a classic case of giving you a bunch of percentages that don’t actually alter how the game plays in any significant way. I can’t tell the difference in my shooting after buying many of these upgrades. Some simply feel like “quality of life” features you’d otherwise expect by default. For instance, you normally have to pick up armor plates “by hand” with a press of a button, but one unlockable upgrade lets you pick them up automatically as you pass. A clear case of “unlock this gizmo on the tech tree to make the game slightly less annoying”.
This doesn’t mean you won’t be killing plenty of Iraqis, of course. The story is set in 1991 and the Gulf War is in full swing; every CoDpiece must have its internationally blinkered fun in the sun, after all. “America’s wars are good, actually” has long been my interpretation of this series, and that’s not much different here. Some armchair moralising comes from one character - a former Stasi with a case of the mild regrets, who refuses to carry a gun and has sworn not to kill again. His theatrical handwringing is undermined by the fact he still works willingly for a gang of off-the-books bloodletters, towards a goal of killing hundreds of people, but shhh, don’t say that to his face. The words “necessary evil” fall from the mouth of this former secret policeman like rotten fruit. Call Of Duty is, yes, alittleless jingoistic this time around. But its seasonal message remains intact: to kill is cool, but only if you do it for the United States Of America.
Shaken down for individual parts (the lighting, the motion capture, the voice acting, the reload animations, etc) Codblops always proves itself an impressive piece of work. But examined holistically, the campaign is still a hackneyed Frankenstein, a monster that loots the interesting organs from other games, then squeezes the juice from those organs in some contrived and limited way without understanding what it is that makes many of those stolen parts work. By the time the game’s biggest bombs land (on a big statue of Saddam Hussein) Call Of Duty: Black Ops 6 proves it has no surprises to offer. It remains an expensive and overcooked taster menu of other, more interesting games.
